Chapter 3 Keneally: Nationalists as ‘Tomorrow’s Ancestors’ Thomas Keneally has long been a writer who gives expression to nationalist sentiment. In 1978 J.J. Healy commented that writers such as Keneally represented ‘a collective, many-motived consciousness’ whose impulse was ‘political, public’.1 Indeed, many of Keneally’s earlier novels illustrate what we might call ‘national progenitors’. In From The Ruins of Colonialism Chris Healy describes a unique historiographical practice of retrospective genealogy, where James Cook was constructed within a nationalist vision which saw him as the founding ancestor of Australia.2 The ancestral narratives within Keneally’s historical fictions do the same thing, by constructing characters who function as ‘tomorrow’s ancestors’. In his pre-1995 novels, Keneally depicts historical figures as ancestors of the modern nation. He uses the resources of mythic narrative to create a distinctive national identity which is broadly ethnic in nature, and which is implicitly defined against ‘other’ nationalisms. This is a fairly straightforward example of how groups ‘mobilise collective memories to sustain enduring corporate identities’.3 However, his more recent fiction includes an element of flexibility in this portrayal of nationalist ancestors, as he begins to move towards a post-humanist conception of national identity through ancestry. It is in his most recent novels that this post- humanist vision is most clear; this is the subject of Chapter Four. This chapter begins with a brief overview of theories of nationalism which have a specific bearing on Keneally’s ancestral narratives. Bhabha’s notion of ‘national narrations’ is central here, as it outlines how narratives articulate differing conceptions of the nation. Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolist approach is also relevant, because it suggests how myth and narrative are essential in the transition from ethnic to modern national identity. Smith’s analysis of ethnic myths of descent is especially useful, as it highlights the role of ancestral narratives in the _________________________________________________________________________________ 1 J.J. Healy, Literature and the Aborigine in Australia: 1970-1975, St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1978, p. 291. 2 Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 29. 3 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 198. 89 Chad Habel, "Ancestral Narratives in History and Fiction" Archived at Australian Digital Theses Project: http://adt.caul.edu.au/ construction of nationhood. These theories will be deployed in a reading of several of Keneally’s earlier novels which depict national identity through constructions of ancestry. The discussion of Keneally’s novels is roughly chronological, because the argument pursues his ancestral narratives throughout his career. Bring Larks and Heroes is a foundational text in this regard, because it depicts the Australian nation as a predominantly ethnic entity through potential ancestors who come to a tragic end.4 Schindler’s Ark is similarly concerned with tragic ancestry, although there is an element of redemption in the form of survival for many of its characters.5 It is in The Playmaker that Keneally’s reshaping of nationalist ancestral narratives is clearer; this novel depicts the convict past as a thorough comedy with many elements of redemption and even reconciliation.6 The more recent novels depict variations or extensions of nationalist ancestry; as they progress, these novels portray a fundamentally revised conception of national history, using ancestry as an essential resource. Nationalism and Ancestral Narratives Keneally’s novels establish a clear connection between nationalism and his ancestral narratives in historical fiction. It is through ancestry that nations are represented and constructed, creating a type of ‘useable past’ which serves the aims of nationalist discourse. Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition challenges the assumption that tradition (particularly with regard to communal affiliation) represents continuity with the past in a fixed, unchanging relationship. ‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with 7 a suitable historic past. _________________________________________________________________________________ 4 Thomas Keneally, Bring Larks and Heroes, Melbourne: Cassell, 1967. 5 Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982. 6 Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987. 7 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 90 Chad Habel, "Ancestral Narratives in History and Fiction" Archived at Australian Digital Theses Project: http://adt.caul.edu.au/ This encapsulates Hobsbawm’s classical modernist thesis, which implies that ancestral narratives are largely artificial constructions which retrospectively create a nation’s past. This stands in stark contrast to the primordialist view, that nations are natural, essentially unchanging entities which loom out of an immemorial past and whose reality is simply reflected or expressed by narrative. It is important to note here that the ‘invention’ or ‘construction’ (or Anderson’s ‘imagining’8) of tradition or nation does not necessarily imply falsity, or inauthenticity. It simply means that nations acquire their authenticity and command loyalty by using popular constructions of history, and with the view to establishing (or maintaining) a sovereign nation-state through shared narratives of origin. In this view nationalism is a function of modernism, although ancestral narratives are rarely directed towards the purely political aims that the modernists imply. Keneally engages wholeheartedly in this imagining of his national community. However, there are also critiques of this position: such modernism tends to betray an elitist bias, and sees nationalism from the ‘top down’. Hobsbawm tends to judge nationalism from the outside, without acknowledging either its subjective reality or persuasive power. Ancestral narratives must be understood as national narrations on their own terms, by giving space to the perspective of the subaltern. When forming the Subaltern Studies group in 1982, Ranajit Guha argued that not only was nationalist discourse dominated by the elite, but that Indian historiography itself has also been overshadowed by an elite bias. What clearly is left out of this un-historical historiography is the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country – that is, the people.9 Subaltern Studies was founded as a forum for discussing these issues and presenting such research, with the firm conviction that it was possible and necessary to oppose elitist historiography. The same goes for ancestral narratives: they are not only _________________________________________________________________________________ 8 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983. 9 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Subaltern Studies I (1982), p 4. 91 Chad Habel, "Ancestral Narratives in History and Fiction" Archived at Australian Digital Theses Project: http://adt.caul.edu.au/ restricted to royal or aristocratic pedigrees. Despite the debate surrounding Subaltern Studies, it is still a viable project, exemplified by the recent contribution of David Lloyd in the case of Irish new histories. For Lloyd, ‘Both the terms “post- colonial” and “subaltern” designate in different but related ways the desire to elaborate social spaces that are recalcitrant to any straightforward absorption … of Ireland into European modernity’.10 This is also true of Irish-Australian ancestral narratives: their expression of nationalism must be understood on their own terms rather than being appropriated by a metropolitan culture. There are several individual approaches to nationalism which are also relevant to ancestry: those of Hastings, Brown and McCrone. Adrian Hastings announces his self-consciousness of himself as analyst, or researcher. He derides Hobsbawm’s attempts to attain critical distance: ‘Hobsbawm can no more leave his “non- historical” Marxist convictions behind than I my Christian and Liberal ones … It is surely better to be aware of them and historicise with them, recognising that they affect our value judgments and that there is no value-free, purely objective, history’.11 Hastings brings to his work a strong ethical sense that the theorist and researcher has the responsibility to ameliorate the destructiveness of nationalism in some forms. He thus challenges the myth of critical distance, which many modernists succumb to. This self-consciousness also applies to the study of ancestral narratives: we cannot escape our origins and